Madison Bikes Calendar Highlights (8/1/16)

posted by Grant Foster | 21sc
August 01, 2016

This week there is only one meeting on the calendar, after last week’s three city transportation meetings. The meeting is tonight already and deals with "proposed bike route system enhancements along West Main Street, South Shore Drive, West Shore Drive, and Gilson Street" (see map above). Read more about the meeting, as well as a short recap of last week's meetings after the fold.

“Please join me to hear from city Traffic Engineering staff to learn more about the proposed bike route system enhancements along West Main Street, South Shore Drive, West Shore Drive, and Gilson Street. We will discuss bike/ motorist signing and pavement markings to enhance the bike route system, including the "Bike Boulevard" designation and its associated signing and marking.”

Last week’s highlights

got its first view of the draft Madison in Motion plan. The materials weren’t available ahead of the meeting and still aren’t published on Legistar, but there really isn’t much to see anyway (here’s a version posted to the MiM site). The plan is supposed to be a ‘comprehensive transportation master plan’ that is meant to ‘guide transportation decisions in the City of Madison...to help make Madison a more walkable, bikeable and livable city…’ It should ‘identify the strategies and implementation recommendations...and will include a realistic, strategic implementation plan for the City to follow for the next 25 years…’ Despite recommendations from the oversight committee, the current draft has no measurable goals and no clear vision, especially as it relates to bicycle transportation in Madison. It’s essentially a collection of concepts and a long list of recommendations to just continue what we’re doing. There should be an opportunity for public comment later this summer/fall.

TORC (Transportation Ordinance Review Committee)

reviewed the Draft Statement of Purpose drafted by City Attorney Strange. This is a big task and the group seems to be making good progress. The biggest identified gap to date has been in the lack of transportation planning (see issues with Madison in Motion). The discussion has begun to coalesce around the concept of having a more comprehensive Transportation Commission. This commission would be focused on driving transportation strategy and policy. What that means for the current transportation committees/commissions is still to be determined. Alder King called out what may be the most critical decision by this body: can we really make progress with a new centralized Transportation Commission if it doesn’t have a matching staff component? In my opinion, this new committee/commission makes a lot of sense, but only if there’s a matching Director of Transportation to coordinate and support it.

Long-Range Transportation Planning Committee (LRTPC)

received presentations on a number of Planning Data Tools: UrbanFootprint, Fiscal Impact Model and Active Living Index. The presentations for these was also not posted to Legistar.